Three fabric postcards.

Cindy in the USA sent me this gorgeous postcard for the Stitchin Fingers birthday swap. She apologised for it being so late, but I didn't mind waiting! She does lovely work, and I knew it would be worth waiting for. I had fun with these Sunbonnet Sue postcards, which are for a swap on Stitchin Fingers. I found a pattern in a book that was exactly the right size for postcards, so I traced it on to template plastic, as I think I'll be using it again - a lot! The first postcard I made was the purple hat Sue. I appliqued the pieces onto plain blue fabric, and added a strip of green fabric for the grass, then added the ric rac and the flowers to jazz it up a bit. The embroidered sun in the corner was a last minute addition.
The next card was a bit different. I've been seeing so many people use paint and pencils etc. on fabrics before they stitch on them, so I thought I'd have a play around with that. I used all kinds of mediums (pencils, felt pens, etc.) to paint the blue sky, the green grass and the orange/yellow sun. Bit of a mish mash really, so I muted it by using a wet paint brush to merge everything. Sue was appliqued on as before, but I changed her a bit, making the gingham apron slightly different, and moving the arm to extend out. That made it look like she was holding something, so I had to add the flower to finish her off. It still looked unfinished to me, so I did random long stitches in green DCM to fill in the grass, then finished off the sun with gold rayon thread.